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Writing CodeCheck Scripts

Overview

CodeCheck scripts are special Perl scripts that let you provide custom checks for verifying your team’s coding standards.
They can be used to verify naming guidelines, metric requirements, published best practices, or any other rules or conventions that are important for your team.

These scripts are developed using the Understand Perl API along with a set of special functions designed to interact with the Understand CodeCheck interface.

What Type of Checks Can I Write?

​With Understand we’ve taken a different approach to static analysis than a lot of other tools and that is also reflected in CodeCheck. Most other static analysis tools focus on identifying bugs, CodeCheck is more ​focused on ​analyzing coding standard​s. For that reason many of our customers use Understand in addition to other static analysis tools​.​
Here are some of the things it does well:

Verify coding style guidelines are met:

Naming Conventions

Spacing Conventions

Required Comment styles

Specified styles for specific code constructs

Metric Thresholds

Line & Statement Counting

Complexity

Comment/Code ratio

Object Coupling

Readability

Find required or unnecessary constructs

Identify required or forbidden calls to libraries or functions

And here are some areas it’s not so good at​:​

Memory allocation/leaks

Tracking data/variables between functions

Anything that requires expression analysis

Type casting/conversions

Identifying arithmetic and floating point issues

Script Locations

Codecheck has several directories it checks for scripts:

C:\Program Files\SciTools\conf\plugin\SciTools\Codecheck

C:\Program Files\SciTools\conf\plugin\User\CodeCheck

C:\Users\USERID\AppData\Roaming\SciTools\plugin\Codecheck

The first location gets overwritten with a new install of Understand so don’t save any changes to that directory, but it’s a good place to look for examples of existing checks.

Write Your First Custom Check

The first part of writing your own Codecheck script is becoming familiar with the API by going through the API Tutorials. Next, to write your own check, start with this template filecodecheck_template.upl(right click, save as)

Save the template file to the Understand installation directory under conf/plugin/User/codecheck/myscript.upl and open the file in a text Editor or in Understand

Now modify the check subroutine to include the regular expression check and to signal a codecheck violation reporting the problem. Add this code at the end of the subroutine:</>

if ($file->name =~ /^[^a-zA-Z]/){
$check->violation(0,$file,-1,-1,"File name does not begin with a letter");
}

The last step is to verify that the perl syntax is correct. The easist way to do this is to open a command line and run the perl application that ships with Understand: uperl -c mysample.upl.

If needed, you can download the complete sample script here – myscript.upl.

If the CodeCheck tab is open in Understand close it and reopen it, and your new check should appear and be ready to test.

Congratulations! You wrote your first Codecheck script. The next step is to become more familiar with Understand’s Perl API. There is a set of tutorials here.
Browsing the Codecheck scripts that are shipped with Understand can also be very beneficial. They can be found in conf/plugin/Scitools/Codecheck/.

If you have questions, just shoot us an email at support@scitools.com.